A Fair Assessment

I've been fairly horrified by the vitriol in the media ever since Jeremy Corbyn's election. I mean, I knew it was coming, but I didn't expect it to be quite this bad. It's been particularly shocking seeing the supposedly-Labour-supporting Guardian attacking him on all fronts, and indeed the legally-impartial BBC. (Indeed, if anyone was doubting bias at the BBC, do you still?)

And make no mistake: Corbyn couldn't win. Had he appointed a woman to one of the key cabinet roles, it would have been attacked as tokenism, or he would have been accused of over-promoting someone without the requisite experience, or it would have been a snub to someone. Had he sung the National Anthem, he would have been accused of hypocrisy. He genuinely could not win.

But...

I watched as much of "Question Time" last night as I could stomach (which wasn't much), and even on a fair assessment, Jeremy Corbyn is doomed. The problem is that both he and John McDonnell genuinely have said some extremely troubling things in the past. And, yes, some of these have been taken out of context, and some of them are perhaps excusable.

But the big problem was that John McDonnell was forced last night to apologise, repeatedly, for things that he really had said, and that he should not have said. And the next time he's on, he'll have to do so again. And again, and again, and again.

All of which makes it impossible for him to get his message across - and it would even if the media weren't rabidly opposed to him and everything he stands for.

It looks like Labour under Jeremy Corbyn really is unelectable.